


you left me here (it's too quiet without you)

by RecklessWriter



Series: I'll Take Up Your Shield [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Character Death (for now...), Comic storylines, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 19:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8857381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecklessWriter/pseuds/RecklessWriter
Summary: A sob rips itself from his throat, a jagged, broken sound. His legs pulled in against his chest, he clenches his hands around the top of his knees, flesh and metal alike, feels the fragility of bone beneath his fingers. He could shatter his kneecap in less than a second, with no effort at all. Without even trying. It wouldn’t matter.


  Steve is dead.


  Nothing matters.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the saddest thing I've ever written. I'm sorry for breaking your hearts.

He doesn’t have time to react, doesn’t have time to so much as blink. It happens in a clash of sound and a flash of light, a singular moment in time where the world simply  _stops._ He sees the palm of the Iron Man suit light up, sees Steve, shieldless and bloody, raise his fists. Stark locks onto his target and fires, and Bucky is frozen in place.

The blast hits Steve in the chest. He stumbles. He falls.

And the world snaps back into motion.

Steve  _(Target: Rogers, Steven. Codename: Captain America)_ is on the ground, his uniform charred and blackened. The asset— _Bucky, Bucky, my name is Bucky—_ is on his knees, hands pressing against the scorched blue of the uniform as red steadily soaks though it. Blood is slipping between his fingers, sticking to his skin and slippery against metal, and Steve’s eyes are locked on his face,  _so fucking blue_ , and he’s the one on the ground but Bucky feels like he’s  _dying—_

Stark  _(Stark. Howard. Oh God, I killed—)_ is somewhere in the background, arm still extended, frozen and horrified, but his presence barely registers. There is nothing but  _this_ , Bucky’s hands coated in red, the glistening of scarlet against metal  _(blood blood blood, Steve—)_ , metal that was created to kill, to destroy, and is now fighting to save  _(Steve. Steve, please—)_ .

“Buck,” Steve chokes. His voice is a strangled croak, rattling in his chest. He coughs, and blood splatters his lips. “Bucky, I…”

“Don’t talk,” Bucky orders. “For God’s sake,  _don’t talk_ .”

Stark stumbles forward, his eyes locked on Steve. He’s removed his face-plate, and his skin is so pale he looks ghostly. “Rogers…”

Bucky  _snarls_ .

Stark freezes in place.

Bucky whips his head around back to Steve. Steve, whose breaths are becoming farther and farther apart and whose eyes are slipping closed and  _no. No, please. Please I just got you back please please please—_

Panic freezes Bucky’s heart, makes his breath catch in his throat. “Steve,” says Bucky, applies more pressure to his chest  _(red red red there’s so much red)_ . “Goddammit— _Steve!_ Open your eyes! You’re not doing this to me!  _You’re not dying!_ ”

Steve’s eyes are closed. His hand reaches up, slowly, to cover Bucky’s—his left one, the metal one. Bucky stares, struck silent by the contrast of their hands; bloody, pale skin against deadly metal. His lips are salty with tears. When did he start crying?

Steve’s hand grips his. “It’s okay,” he breathes, “it’s okay.”

His grip goes slack.

The world is still.

“Steve?” Bucky breathes. He’s shaking.

His chest is still beneath  ~~the asset’s~~ — _Bucky’s_ hands. His eyes are closed. He’s not breathing.

He’s  _not breathing._

_Horror_ terror **icecold** _panic_ wrap around his lungs, invade his mouth, fill his chest. Blood roars in his ears, clouds his brain, the world is  _wrongwrongwrong_ and nothing’s right and there’s  _somuchtoomuchred._ Everything tilts and spins and turns inside out, he can’t see he can’t think he can’t breathe.  _Steve. Steve’s not breathing Steve’s not—_

“ _No!_ ” 

The yell escapes from deep in his chest, doesn’t sound human. He pounds on Steve’s chest. Again. Again. There’s blood between his fingers and under his nails and Steve is still. So so still, not moving not breathing not  _living._ His mind is a litany of pleas.

_Steve don’t go don’t leave nononono don’t die on me pleasepleaseplease—_

In a place in his mind that still notices things, isn’t locked in place on the sight of Steve’s blood, Steve’s stillness—he’s vaguely aware of two other presences entering the demolished bunker. Two pairs of footsteps. A flash of red in the corner of his vision—the woman called Natasha  _(Romanova, Natalia. Codename: Black Widow)_ .

“Oh God,” someone  _(Stark, Anthony)_ breathes. “Oh God, what did I  _do_ ?”

There’s a sharp intake of breath as they take in the scene. The Widow is frozen, her face an icy contrast against her fiery hair. Behind her—the man in the cat-suit. The king.

“My word,” he exhales, barely a breath. “What—”

Stark shakes his head. “I didn’t… I never meant…”

It’s not until Stark speaks, it hits him. Hits him with the force of wind jerking him off a freight car, sending him plummeting into the terrain below. Steve is dead—gone  _(Ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?)_ . And Stark—he did that.  _He did it._

The rage is so sudden, so strong, it knocks out everything else. It’s pure and animalistic, works its tendrils around his brain, scrapes against the inside of his skull.  _Rage_ pain **anger** _hate_ that grinds against his insides like bone against cavity.  _Burningburningburning_ the color of blood and death, the sound of metal shattering bone, breaking beneath his hands, knuckles splitting and fingers snapping coming down  _again, again, again._

And there’s metal beneath him  _(iron)_ on the ground, and his fists are coming down, punching punching punching. A face, stone white—white and red and bloody, an awful, awful thing, took Rogers, took  _Steve_ . MISSION: ELIMINATE  _breakbreakbreak—_

There are voices and sounds and noise, screaming, yelling, shrieking. They don’t matter. Only the Mission. Kill kill kill.  _He killed Steve, he killed Steve, he took him away—_

There are suddenly hands, grasping at him pulling him away, back, away from the Mission. They fight him, he struggles. He lashes out, kicking twisting pulling biting,  _let go let go let me fucking go—_

Then  _she’s_ in front of him, the spider in flames, and he knows her, he knows her. But she will not stand in his way.

“I’m sorry, Barnes,” she says.

He lunges to knock her aside—

_“Sputnik,”_ she snaps, wields the word like a knife.

The world cuts to black.

*******

Waking is painful.

He lays still, unmoving, assessing parameters. He is on his back, laying down. Surroundings unfamiliar. Damages include dislocated shoulder, what feels like three cracked ribs, four broken fingers, shattered knuckles. Bothersome, but still operational. Pain is merely a concept. It can be overcome.

There are people in the room, speaking. Two sets of breathing.  ~~The asset~~ — _Bucky_ stays motionless. Eyes shut, breathing even.

“—bout Rogers?” a voice, familiar, is saying.

Bucky feels a jolt go through him.  _Steve._

A sigh, long and exhausted. “As cold as it may seem, we can’t focus on that now. Ross is still campaigning for all our heads, and I think we’ve all stepped too far into the fire this time. We’re done, Tony. We flew too close to the sun, they burned our wings.”

“I’ll talk to Ross.” There’s a desperate tone to the words now, almost pleading. “Reason with him—”

“Don’t you _understand_ ? There is no reasoning with him. You don’t  _reason_ with a man like that. Once his mind is made, it’s stone. No persuading, no bargaining—he isn’t going to stop. You want a second opinion, just ask Bruce.”

“That’s not fair—”

“ _Fair_ ?” The voice is sharp, laced with anger. “None of this is  _fair_ , Stark. Rhodes is in the hospital, they put Wanda in a  _straitjacket_ . Clint’s supposed to be home with his kids, and instead he’s locked in a cell!”

“I know—”

“Steve is  _dead_ —”

“I  _know_ !”

Bucky’s heart stops. His breath catches somewhere deep in his chest. The world is frozen.  _Steve is dead._ The words repeat, a broken record.  _Steve is dead, Steve is dead, Steve is dead._

Everything comes rushing back.

He remembers the bunker—Zemo, and the surveillance of him killing the Starks ( _Do you even remember them?_ ). He remembers Steve, prone and still ( _blood, blood on his hands, on the ground, under his fingernails_ ), and the haze of rage that consumed him, whitened out his vision, as he lost James Barnes to the Soldier, lost hold of the man and fell once again into the weapon. He remembers beating Stark senseless—attempting to tear him limb from limb, feeling bone break beneath his fists. The Widow pulling him back. Then—

_Sputnik._

Even simply  _thinking_ the word is enough to make him go completely  _blank_ for just a mere half-of-a-second, to black out his vision. As though someone pulled his plug and shut down the power. The lights are on—but no one’s home.

He comes back to himself quickly. Simply another of the numerous safe-locks Hydra implanted into his brain.

“That wasn’t…supposed…to  _happen_ !” Stark is yelling, voice thick and halting. “He wasn’t supposed to—it was— _this wasn’t supposed to happen!_ ”

“But it did,” says Widow. Her voice, though level, is deadly and cold as ice. “ _You_ killed him. And now you have to live with it.”

There is a gasping breath—the sound of a man drowning and struggling to stay afloat. “I didn’t mean for this—I never wanted—” Stark exhales a breath that sounds just on the edge of a sob. His voice is lost, broken, as he asks, “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” Widow replies. “And I don’t care. Your guilt isn’t my problem.”

A sob finally breaks free, a fractured noise—and Bucky is suddenly flooded with anger. Stark is the one who did this— _he_ is the one who  _killed_ Steve. What right does he have to be upset? What right does he have to shed tears over him? Over what  _his actions_ wrought?

This anger isn’t the same as before—isn’t a blind explosion of rage, causing him to lash out at anyone and anything within arms’ length. This anger doesn’t cause him to completely lose sight of himself. No, this is steadier, controlled. A slow boil building beneath his skin, running molten through his veins. This anger feels secure and exact, something he can take by the reins and  _use_ , instead of letting it use him.

He stops pretending to still be unconscious, and shoves himself up off the floor where he’s laying. Stark and Romanov are a few feet away, and both of them snap their heads in his direction, expressions of surprise (he should probably feel proud—not many people are capable of startling the legendary Black Widow) on their faces.

Romanov recovers quickly, takes a cautious but sturdy step in his direction. “Barnes,” she says. She’s not scared of him, but she’s uncertain to how he’ll react. “Do you remember what happened?”

She doesn’t want him to go off again. She’s trying to calm him. She needn’t have bothered—he only has eyes for Stark.

Stark, looking miserable and defeated; eyes rimmed red and weighed down with the knowledge of what he’d done, and still had the energy to glare at Bucky as though he’s the single most disgusting thing on the planet.

Who knows—maybe he is. Bucky killed his parents, he can’t blame Stark for hating him. But what he did to  _Steve_ ? Because of something  _Bucky_ did, because Steve was simply too damn loyal to give up on him, even when it was more than obvious that he should? That is something Bucky  _can_ blame him for—something he  _does_ blame him for.

So when he throws himself at Stark, grabbing him by the shirt (he’d removed his Suit) and slamming him against the opposite wall, he feels completely justified in doing so.

A rather nasty string of Russian is spat from his lips. Stark struggles against him, but Bucky’s grip holds. His metal fist wraps around his throat, reminiscent of the way he’d wrapped it around Maria Stark’s throat, all those years ago. Stark’s nails scrabble at his neck, doing nothing but peeling back skin. 

“Barnes!” Romanov ( _Natalia_ ) yells. “Barnes, stand down!  _Vol’no, soldat_ !”

The familiar command throws him for a moment, and instinct causes his grip to go slack. But then he quickly remembers himself, and his fingers tighten again. Stark gasps.

“ _Otpusti yego_ !” Widow yells in Russian. “ _Prosto uspokoysya—”_

_“Hvatit!”_ he snarls back.

Widow’s eyes are hard. She steps forward, closer. “ _Vy sobirayetes’ yego ubit’!_ ”

Bucky snaps his head back to look at her. “He killed Steve!”

Her face softens, just a fraction. “I know. I’m sorry, James.”

The use of the name makes him startle, snaps his brain back years, to a little girl with hair as red as flame, as graceful as she is deadly.  _You could at least recognize me._

Natalia.

“But you need to let Tony go,” she is saying. “You’ll only make things worse for yourself, killing him  _won’t bring Steve back_ . He believed in you—he never gave up hope his friend was still there somewhere, refused to back down, to let go of hope. He had  _faith_ in you, Barnes. Don’t make up for that by killing in his name.”

His mind chooses then to throw a memory out in front of his eyes: ~~Bucky~~ _the asset_ looking through the scope of ~~his~~ _its_ rifle, finger steady on the trigger as ~~he~~ _it_ took the shot. Watching from the rooftop as the bullet sliced through the mark’s skull, and the mark falling dead to the ground. The asset feeling nothing other than the achievement of another mission completed.

And Steve, Steve’s voice saying,  _What you did all those years. It wasn’t you._

But this is. This, here and now, isn’t Hydra’s asset choking the life out of another Stark. This is Bucky Barnes, not the Soldier.  _Bucky_ is killing him.

_It wasn’t you._

Bucky stumbles backwards blindly, at the sudden rush of nausea that floods him, releasing Stark as though burned. Eyes wide, he backs up slowly. The rage drains away. He feels like he’s shaking apart.

What is he  _doing_ ? Murdering someone in cold blood—and this time no one else is pulling the strings. This time it’s his finger curled around the trigger, his hand on the controls. Hydra has no need to make him kill—he’s doing it anyway.

He really is a monster. 

Feet in front of him, Stark is gasping in air, hand at his throat. He slides down the wall to the floor. Bucky’s startled to see the gleam of tears in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, to no one, to everyone. “I’m so, so  _sorry_ .”

Bucky backs up, away, putting a distance between him and Stark, only stopping when he feels himself hit the wall on the opposite side of the room. He slides down it to the ground, in a position identical to Stark, and turns his face away. He can’t bear to see the guilt and grief in Stark’s expression. Maybe if he doesn’t look, it won’t be real. Maybe if he doesn’t look, Steve won’t be—won’t be—

A burning pain is lodged beneath his ribs, and his own breath is strangling him as he falls. It’s 1944 and he’s dangling on the edge of a railcar, as the wind rips his body away, tears a scream from his throat, sends the world spinning. It rips him open, like how they opened him up and took him apart, played with his nerves and his insides, remade him into something else, into a weapon to aim.

There’s an abyss in his head and on its edge is an emptiness so vast and damning, sliding a knife between his ribs, and it makes it hard to breathe and in his head Steve—

_Steve—_

It’s hard to breathe and in his head Steve Rogers looks so young and so proud and so hopeful, like someone that God’s given every grace, and in memory he’s not going to touch that and in memory he won’t let anyone else touch it either and—

And his head is full of an English pub and a black pit in his mind he’s pretending isn’t there, of the taste of scotch and the weight of Steve’s hand on his shoulder and of laughter that can be just a little bit bitter because Steve doesn’t really understand bitterness, never has, and is so elated on success that you’d have to use a bullet to break through.

And voices ring in his brain like echoes of ghosts, sharp words like jagged pieces of glass.

_Nice ta meet ya, Bucky. I’m Steve._

_I don’t care about some dumb girl! I like you much better anyway._

_Don’t listen to them, Stevie. You’re amazing—they don’t see it, they’re not worth it._

_Thank you, Buck. But I can get by on my own._

_Ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?_

_Bucky! Hold on!_

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

_I knew him._

_I’m not gonna fight you. You’re my_ **_friend_ ** _._

A sob rips itself from his throat, a jagged, broken sound. His legs pulled in against his chest, he clenches his hands around the top of his knees, flesh and metal alike, feels the fragility of bone beneath his fingers. He could shatter his kneecap in less than a second, with no effort at all. Without even trying. It wouldn’t matter.

Steve is dead.

Nothing matters.

He remembers sunlight glinting against fair hair, turning it golden. Blue eyes, clear and beautiful, peering up at him. The feeling of a bony shoulder beneath his hand.  _I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, pal._

_But it wasn’t supposed to be yours,_ Bucky thinks.  _Oh Steve, it was_ never _supposed to be yours._

The end of the line always meant his. Even small and sickly, Steve had the strongest will of anyone he ever knew, was always going to be the one to make it. They told him he wasn’t likely to live past twenty, he proved them all wrong. Steven Rogers was born a survivor; Bucky was dead the moment his draft papers arrived in the mail. War was a mess of blood and pain and death; Zola strapped him down to that table and he knew he’d never see Brooklyn again.

He wasn’t expecting to make it out. He wasn’t expecting to be saved.

He should’ve died on that table.

But he didn’t. He didn’t and now he’s here; seventy years later, a weapon forged from violence and blood. And the only person who ever gave a damn about him is gone.

His only reason for living—his only reason for  _surviving_ —is dead.

_Steve_ is _dead._

And there’s nothing left.

*******

“Do you know where you are?” Romanov ( _Natalia_ ) asks him sometime later. Could be hours. Could be days. Time blurs together, no longer holds any meaning. Nothing does.

She’s speaking to him gently, like approaching an abused animal. He’s unpredictable to her, an unknown variable. She doesn’t like that. It throws her off-balance.

Stark is gone. Where, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. The room is empty of all but the two of them, and the Widow’s voice rings strangely in the silence; it doesn’t belong. He’s pressed tightly against the wall as though trying to sink into it, hasn’t moved. Doesn’t know where he would go. The Widow is crouched in front of him, close enough to carefully monitor his body language but far enough away so that she’s still maintaining a professional distance. Her face is carefully blank.

“We’re on a transport provided by King T’Challa,” she says when he doesn’t respond. “He’s offered us sanctuary in Wakanda. We’re flying there now so we can lay low until we figure out our next move.”

He stares ahead vacantly, doesn’t react. He doesn’t care where he is, doesn’t care where he’s going. In his mind he sees Steve stumble, sees Steve fall. He sees himself,  _too fucking slow_ .

“I’m sorry for what I did back in the bunker,” says Romanov. “I only used that shut-down code as a last resort. I don’t regret it—it needed to be done—but I’m sorry that I had to. I know a little something about how it feels to be controlled.”

There’s a slight pause, then: “I don’t know if you remember—”

“I remember,” he cuts her off. “Natalia.”

And he does remember. He remembers a little girl with hair as red as flame, two braids falling down her back. He remembers the deadly glint in her eyes and the grace in her movements. He remembers taking a child and transforming her into a killer.

The silence is deafening, heavy and pressing down on him. He is Atlas, holding up the entire sky on his shoulders, and the weight is slowly but surely crushing him. 

“He loved you, you know,” she says softly, after a long moment. Bucky’s breath catches somewhere in his chest. His fingers dig into the floor. “He never told me of course, but. He didn’t need to. The way he looked at you…you’re the only one he ever allowed himself to be selfish for. He would’ve burned the entire world down if it meant keeping you safe.”

Bucky’s chest feels tight, his insides twisted and stretched. “I never asked for that,” he says, and his voice comes out a fragile, broken thing. Memories of Steve, happy, smiling, scrape against his mind and the inside of his eyelids like jagged glass. “I never asked for him to save me. I didn’t  _want_ him to save me.”

His hands shake. The back of his throat burns, his eyes sting. But he’s not going to break. Not here, not in front of her. He clenches his hands, and tries to breathe through the giant hole in his chest. He bears the burden of the sky and refuses to allow it to bury him.

The Widow is solemn and silent, her fingers twisting around the arrow necklace at her throat. Then she begins uncertainly, choosing each of her words cautiously, “People like us…we don’t believe in such fanciful notions as redemption. We’ve all got red in our ledger, and once it’s there it soaks in, and the stain never washes out. There’s no salvation for us, we damned ourselves too long ago for any of that to matter. We’re passed the point of saving. And we don’t desire it.

“But sometimes,” she says, after a very slight pause, “sometimes someone comes along and sees our broken pieces, and will stop at nothing in figuring out how to fit them back together again. We never asked them to do it, we don’t want them to. But they do it anyway. Because they see something in us we could never see in ourselves. They see  _hope_ .

“He saw hope in you, Barnes. Somewhere beneath all that brainwashing, he glimpsed the man he used to know and decided that man was still worth saving. He chose  _you_ , and he damned all the consequences. He was never going to give up on you. Giving up on you would’ve meant giving up on himself.”

Bucky’s shaking again, he realizes (did he ever stop?). At some point he started crying, because his face is wet; he tastes salt on his lips. Widow’s words wrap around his heart, clog his throat. They’re strangling him.

“Always was a stubborn punk,” he mutters. His voice is choked.

Natalia smiles, slow and sad. There’s a suspicious sheen in her eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, he was.”

*******

After she leaves, the following hours (days?) pass as though in a dream. Nothing is real or tangible, and time is an incomprehensible concept. He can’t feel anything, doesn’t care to, and his body stays slumped there like a marionette whose strings have been cut. The phrase  _numb with grief_ comes to mind, and he knows this lack-of-feeling will fade eventually, and the reality will begin to set in.

He remembers the day his father died, when he was nineteen—or was he twenty? The memories from then are blurry, but he remembers his mother’s face, like her world had caved in and collapsed, and remembers Becca clinging to him, her small arms around his neck, sobbing into his shoulder. He remembers the gaping chasm inside him, cold and empty, watching them fall apart as though separated by thick, fogged-up glass.

He remembers Steve being the same after Sarah. Silent and numb in the days following, sitting through the service without shedding a tear. Only afterward, Bucky pulling him into a hug, had he allowed himself to fall apart.

And so, he knows, this feeling of numbness won’t last. Already he can feel it draining away, the pain slowly creeping back in. His insides still feel cold and dead, but the physical hurts that he staved off now once again make themselves known, his bones aching from all the injuries he’s acquired. The fingers of his flesh hand are broken, the knuckles shattered. Even now they are trying to heal. His face is scraped and bloody, his arm dislocated (the real one).

But still, it’s a dull ache; one that can be ignored. Dislocation is easy to fix. There’s a place to go back and the body wants it. The only difficulty is the pain. There are…few, very few pains he cares about. And right now thought is like sharp shards of glass slicing through his skull, and he is afraid of this. Terrified of this.   

After the Potomac, he found somewhere to brace and put his shoulder where it belongs. Pain is only a context, but he remembers it anyway and it feels—

There is a knife along his spine. There is a gun against his ankle. And right now he is less afraid of them and the darkness after than he is of anything else.

_I’m with you ‘til the end of the line,_ he said.

Bucky lets out a whimper and buries his face in his knees. He pulls at his hair, wants to scream until his voice breaks and shatters.

_Why aren’t you here, Steve?_ he begs, desperate, shouting into the void.  _You’re supposed to be here. Come back. Please come back._

 

There is no answer. His pleas are swallowed in the silence. 

**Author's Note:**

> Don't worry. I only break things when I plan to fix them eventually. This is the first of a series which will have Bucky eventually taking up the mantle of Captain America, and rediscovering who he is now that he's no longer the Winter Soldier.
> 
> And yes, reuniting with Steve. Eventually.
> 
> Also, this is the first time I've written Stucky...or any Marvel, and I think I made them in character but...I'm not sure??? Natasha was particularly hard for me to write.


End file.
